The Pan Am 103 Verdict (Part 1) (fwd from marxism-international)

[David Welch <david.welch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

                     THE PAN AM 103 VERDICT
                        by William Blum*

    The papers are filled with pictures of happy relatives of the victims of
the 1988 bombing of PanAm 103.  A Libyan, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi,
was just found guilty of the bombing by a Scottish court in the Hague, his
co-defendant, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, being acquitted.  At long last there's
going to be some kind of closure for the families.
    What's wrong with this picture?
    What's wrong is that the evidence against Megrahi is thin to the point
of
transparency.  The court verdict might be dubbed Supreme Court II, another
instance of non-judicial factors clouding judicial reasoning.  The three
Scottish judges can not have relished returning to the UK after finding both
defendants innocent of the murder of 270 people, largely from the UK and the
US.  Not to mention having to directly face dozens of hysterical victims'
family members in the courtroom.  And with the full knowledge of the desires
of Washington and Downing Street as to the outcome.
    I have now read the entire 26,000-word Opinion of the Court which
accompanied the verdict.  One has to do that, as well as being very familiar
with the history of the case, as I am, to appreciate what the judges did.
I
can only offer here a few examples of the many questionable aspects of the
decision.
    The key charge against Megrahi -- the sine qua non -- is that he caused
a
suitcase with explosives to be loaded at Malta airport and tagged it so it
would pass through Malta, Frankfurt and London airports without an
accompanying passenger and without being inspected.  That by itself would
have been a major feat and so unlikely to happen that any terrorist with any
common sense would have found a better way.  But aside from anything else,
we
have this -- as to the first step, loading the suitcase at Malta: there is
no
witness, no video, no document, no fingerprints, no nothing, no evidence of
any kind.  And the court admits it: "The absence of any explanation of the
method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180
[Air Malta] is a major difficulty for the Crown case."
    The court places great -- nay, paramount -- weight upon the supposed
identification of Megrahi by a storekeeper in Malta as the purchaser of the
clothing found in the bomb suitcase.  But this storekeeper had earlier
identified several other people as the culprit, including one who was a CIA
agent.  When he finally identified Megrahi from a photo, it was after
Megrahi's photo had been in the world news for years.  Again, the court
acknowledges the possible danger inherent in such a decision:

     These identifications were criticised inter alia on the ground that
photographs of the accused have featured many times over the years in the
media and accordingly purported identifications more than ten years after the
event are of little if any value.

    The Opinion of the Court places considerable weight as well on the
suspicious behavior of Megrahi prior to the fatal day, making much of his
comings and goings abroad, phone calls to unknown parties for unknown
reasons, the use of a pseudonym, etc.  The three judges try to squeeze as
much mileage out of these events as they can, as if they had no better case
to make.  But Megrahi was seemingly a member of Libyan intelligence, and last
we all knew, Libya is entitled to have an intelligence service, and
intelligence agents have been known to act ... well, in mysterious ways, for
whatever assignment they're on.  The court had no idea what assignment, if
any, Megrahi was working on.
    There is much more that is known about the case that makes the court
verdict and written opinion questionable, although credit must be given the
court for its frankness about what it was doing, even while it was doing it.
"We are aware that in relation to certain aspects of the case there are a
number of uncertainties and qualifications.  We are also aware that there is
a danger that by selecting parts of the evidence which seem to fit together
and ignoring parts which might not fit, it is possible to read into a mass
of
conflicting evidence a pattern or conclusion which is not really justified."
    Let's hope that Megrahi is really guilty.  It would be a terrible shame
if he spends the rest of his life in prison because back in 1990, as the
United States was preparing for war against Iraq and needed Syria and Iran
as
allies, Washington suddenly dropped those two countries as the prime suspects
in the plane bombing and -- seemingly from nowhere -- discovered Libya, the
Arab state least supportive of the US buildup to the Gulf War.

* William Blum is the author of "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only
Superpower" and "Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since
World War 2"